by Rick Kueber
The interior was much as I had remembered, plain and gray with soft, nearly rounded edges. The hordes of Takers followed behind us, making a quick escape impossible. Unlike my first glimpse inside a Titan, I was anything but unnoticed and free to do as I pleased. The Takers escorted Daniel and me through the large, open area and into a much smaller space. I immediately noticed the circular bumps on the floor, but much larger than the ones from my previous visit. With their unrelenting grip, the Takers pulled us into the center of the dots that were sculpted into the floor. I dreaded what would come next and I looked to Daniel with worried eyes.
I began to feel anxious and uncomfortable as the air around us seemed to fill with an electric charge. My stomach knotted and a humming in my brain grew louder and unbearable. Straining to keep my eyes open, I glanced to my young traveling companion to find that he was not experiencing the same torturous pain that I was. I found some comfort in this, though it was minor compared to the stabbing pain that filled my head. The others around me began to fade and dissipate before my eyes and I had a fleeting thought. If I could get off of the textured floor, maybe I could avoid whatever i was about to face and work on an escape plan. My feet felt like they were fastened to the floor and I found myself unable to move, which was probably for the best. If I had escaped this teleport device, there were thousands of Takers to get past and I was not ignored as 'one of them' like I had been before. There was also the question of what horrors might await Daniel alone if I were to somehow escape the device. The static electricity that filled the space intensified and the pulsating hum in my brain grew with every labored beat of my heart. I wanted nothing more than for this pain to end. I prayed for it. I even offered my own life in exchange for an end to the physical torture, but my request was denied. Moments, that felt like days, crept by and I nearly passed out from the excruciating sensations. The space around me went white and the stabbing in my brain eased.
***
“What has caused this delay?” A strange, gender-neutral voice that came from everywhere asked the question.
“We do not know.” A second voice, which sounded more male, answered with an inflection of fear or worry. As my vision cleared I could see that we were surrounded by Takers, Ahsushas and two alien beings of light and energy, but the words seemed to come from the air around us. “There is no logical answer.”
“Let us look into its mind and reveal what is hidden.” The neutral voice expressed an intimidating and foreboding statement.
“Prepare it.” The second voice commanded more forcefully and self-assured.
The beings referring to me as 'it' was unusual and somewhat disturbing. Even though I was stronger than I had been before my transformation, I was still no match for the strength of these Takers. Surrounding me, they began to remove the strap and holster that held my weapon and followed by completely stripping me naked. I had not always been confident in my nude self, but I was not embarrassed by my physique. I was, however, ashamed by the fact that I was completely vulnerable and unable to defend myself or Daniel.
Chapter 3
Retrieval
Two Ahsushas took my upper arms and brought me before the two alien beings at the far end of the odd, oval shaped space. Placing me in a specific spot, one of the Ahsushas dropped to the floor and grasping my ankles, moved my bare feet into an unmarked, but obviously exact, place, one at a time. The floor was unremarkable and smooth. At least I did not have the anxiety of being teleported again... until I realized that my feet were once again frozen to the surface beneath me. I felt an uneasiness in my gut and a tingling in my legs, but something was different this time. I looked past my bare chest and stomach, beyond the marks that my pelvic bones made on either side of my abdomen and down my naked legs to my frozen feet. A cold sensation taunted the soles of my feet and I watched helplessly as a rippling, blue liquid-like gel crept up from underneath and began to encase my toes and the sides of my feet.
The pool of blue gel was forming in a rounded rectangular shape on the floor around me. The Ahsushas backed away as if they feared touching the cold fluid that grew from the floor around me. It appeared to be filling in an invisible barrier that surrounded me and I panicked as I watched my calves and thighs disappear into its icy grip. My body shivered uncontrollably and I stretched my trembling arms over my head as if I could somehow escape my freezing prison. With intimidating looks, the Ahsushas took my forearms and forced them down at my sides. My struggle was futile against their overpowering strength and my fingers and hands flailed in vain. In the very moment my fingertips touched the gel, they were locked in place and seized by the blue, frigid nightmare. Once both hands were captured, my battle was lost.
The chilling blue slowly grew in height and my heart quickened, partly out of fear and partly as a natural response to try to warm my hypothermic body. With my shoulders disappearing, I could only hope that the gel would stop before it reached my mouth and nose. My chin instinctively raised and my neck stretched out as high as it could, but it was to no avail. The coldness covered my chin and crept up to my lower lip. The inevitable was upon me and I sucked in a deep breath and clenched my mouth and eyes closed tight. I felt the cold gel creep into my ears and my nostrils. An ice cream brain freeze did not come close to describing to chilling discomfort that began to torment my head, like millions of needle-points stinging inside my skull. I held my breath until I was near the point of passing out.
I had more purpose than I had ever had, I had someone I loved with all of my being and I had a child of my own on the way. I was the strongest physically and mentally than I had ever been in my entire life, but they were stronger and they had broken me. My eyes and mouth opened wide and I reflexively gasped and inhaled deeply, but there was no relief. The gel gurgled as it filled my mouth and throat and oozed into my lungs, penetrating the alveoli and seeping into my bloodstream. I could see light penetrating the blue gel that now covered me entirely and I could feel and sense it slipping into my tear ducts, working its way towards my brain. There was a moment of surrender, when I thought that maybe I could just allow myself to fall asleep and slip into a peaceful and unconscious state that would slowly end painlessly. I hoped and prayed that this would not also be Daniel's fate, or Elle's. In that moment, I knew I could not give up. If the alien beings did not get what they needed from me, Daniel would surely be their next source of information.
The terrifying and painful feeling of drowning ensued and did not end, though there was a slight distraction. I was one with the alien being's thoughts and the controls of the Titan, but I was not able to do anything about them, only observe on an all-knowing level. As much as I was afraid of dying and as much as I hated the invading species with every ounce of hatred I could muster... I was uncomfortably fascinated.
Images began to appear, not in my mind, but it was more like they came to life and I watched them from within each scene. At first, I watched my early years pass by like a flickering film from an old nickelodeon theater. Some moments passed much faster than others but no matter how fast or how slow, I saw every moment of my life played out. The first familiar scene, that I had seen in a dream was when I was a child, spending the night at a sleepover with several of my friends. Waking in the middle of the night, I found my friends asleep, scattered on the floor like rag-dolls in disarray. The television turned on without warning and without reason and almost in unison, a blinding light broke through the window and was quickly dimmed. I wandered outside, innocently, to see what its source was. I stood in the front yard on a typical neighborhood street in the mid-west, lined with cracker-box houses and dotted with parked cars covered in dew, and a being approached me. It was small in stature, pale gray in color and it seemed to be luminescent, but its glow did not light our surroundings. It had no face, no eyes, no mouth, no features whatsoever, but I was not afraid when it reached out for me. Touching my face and temple, it searched my mind and my emotions, and then spoke to me.
“We will return to you. Be not
afraid, for you are our fate and your destiny is greater than anything you can conceive. You will not remember me until the day arrives when you must. Then and only then will you know what you must do. You are destined to save your race and ours. Go now, sleep and I will pass you on the roads as you travel, and I will see you again at the water's edge.”
My soul was chilled by the memories I could not recall on my own. The scenes flicker flashed forward and I found myself in another familiar memory... playing super-hero tag, outside with a friend. I saw my frail body slip on the grass, wet from the oscillating sprinkler, and slam hard into the ground. When I watched myself roll over, like an out of body experience, and the blood stream from my nose and my lip, the lights descended from the summer sky, but I was helpless and unable to intercede. Three tiny lights, unperceived by any others, zipped through the atmosphere and penetrated the bloody nose and mouth of my child-self that lay motionless on the damp lawn. As if I had become the lights, I traveled into the cuts and abrasions, into my own bloodstream. I followed a maze of vessels inside my own head that led into my brain, where I found a pool of blood in my temporal lobe where the lights rested. I was no science brainiac, but I suddenly understood. The temporal lobe was the part of the brain that controlled, among other things, memory.
As if the vision were a microscope, it zoomed into a cellular level and I watched as the tiny lights became glowing forms, like tiny astronauts exploring a brave new world. These microscopic beings began to restructure the neurons and pathways in that minuscule part of my cerebrum and they began to build an entirely new structure. Zooming in even farther, I watched as the cells grew massively larger than my vision and the double helix structures of my own DNA came into focus. The nano-astronauts began removing and replacing certain parts of specific nucleotides and replacing them with bits of what could only be described as alien DNA. The possibility that there had been alien DNA in my head since I was a child left me unsure of anything. Did I know about this before I lost my memory? I didn't believe so, but I didn’t know anything for sure anymore. The experience darkened and disappeared, filling me with questions that I could not answer.
The picture zoomed out slowly as the scene flew by, days, weeks and months lasting no more than seconds. Without a calendar or ticking clock to count the moments that passed, I knew that I had witnessed years of work and I had watched as the nano-astronauts, these tiny beings of light, built a monumental structure within my brain, though at its completion, it was no bigger than a pencil eraser.
The memories continued on and carried me through my adolescence, my teen years and beyond. Some moments were awkwardly emotional and painful and others were wildly joyous. Though the dull physical painful sensation of drowning continued relentlessly, my lack of control became the most heartbreaking and hellish part of my experience. I could not savor the moments nor could I skip over any of them. It was like a living hell.
My memories slowed and focused on a moment in my early adulthood. I wandered through a dark hallway when a sudden and unexpected shock ran through me and I felt dizzy and nauseous. The diminutive light beings made their exodus from my brain, much in the reverse of their arrival. My experience was as if I were one of them and we traveled back through the arteries of my body and burst through the lining of my nostrils. When the lights returned to where they had come from, I was given a glimpse of my life I had not seen, a flash I did not remember.
In the dark of night, my adult body collapsed on the hardwood floor of a hallway. A radiant, and scantily clad, young woman rushed out of a nearby bedroom and fell to the floor next to my body.
“Tanner!” She screamed, shaking my body. “Tanner, wake up.”
Her cries tore at my heart and I watched as the blood flowed from my nose. I hadn't hit it in the fall. It had started bleeding, apparently on its own... but I now knew the truth.
“Tanner!” She screamed again and ran back to the other room for her cell-phone.
She rushed back in with the phone to her ear and I could hear the female voice on the other end repeat the canned and rehearsed line. “911, what's your emergency?”
“It's my fiance... he collapsed in the hallway. His nose is bleeding and he won't wake up. Can you send an ambulance, please?” She wept, pleading with the 911 operator.
“Has this happened before?” The voice on the phone was calm and unconcerned.
“No this hasn't happened before!” her voice was frightened and angry. “Just send a damn ambulance... NOW!” Her pleas had become a forceful order.
“Calm down, miss. You aren't helping the situation by being irrational.” The operator attempted to defuse the situation.
“I will NOT calm down.” Her voice was gravely and filled with fury. “YOU will send an ambulance, or so help me I will...” The operator stopped her before she could finish her threat.
“I need your address.” Her tone was blank as my fiancee rattled off the address in southern Indiana. “An ambulance is on its way. Please stay on the line until they arrive. Can you tell me anything else about the condition of your fiancee?”
She placed the phone on the floor and put it on speaker. “He has a pulse.” She whimpered. “He's breathing, but it's not normal. And his nose is still bleeding.”
I watched like a ghost in the fog as the paramedics arrived and placed my limp body on their cart. A thought went through my mind... were the alien beings watching this as well, and if so, why? A dizzying feeling came over me and the scene flashed forward and I found myself in a hospital room with my fiancee by my side, holding my hand. A game show was playing on the wall mounted television. The volume was turned low and grumbled from the call box speaker at the side of the hospital bed as a doctor entered the room.
“I know this is all quite a shock to you, but I can assure you that you are in the best place you could be right now. We still need to run some more tests and I'd like to order another MRI, but what the CT scan and first MRI have shown is this; there is a small mass in your temporal lobe. It appears that there was a small formation, possibly a calcium deposit, that has had a tumorous growth surrounding it. There is no way to know why, or exactly when it formed. At first glance, it does not appear to be operable, but it also doesn't seem to be a major threat and most likely will never be terminal. Depending on what we find with future tests and scans, we can put together a plan with options and alternatives.” The neurosurgeon spoke like he was explaining test curriculum to a high school-er... dry and unemotional.
I was pulled from the hospital room scene and flung forward in time and memory. My life played out before me so quickly, it gave me a feeling of being sea-sick and hung over all at the same time. I wanted to throw up, but I was unable to, being encased in this blue gelatinous prison. Like the end of a steel roller-coaster, the spinning vision stopped on another dream I remembered. I was aboard a plane with my now wife sitting next to me. She held a brochure in her hand for The California Cancer Center. She showed me the beautiful sunset out her window and I saw the three brilliant lights returning and the Titan entering the atmosphere above and behind us. When the plane lost power, I watched my body being teleported onto the Titan and stood in the control center, only seconds later. My heart broke and my will to live died when I saw the jet, that carried the woman I loved, lose all power and plummet to the desolate earth below. It touched down in a fiery explosion and I fell to my knees. An alien being approached me and held my head. It was sensing my emotion and sharing it. With the power of its thoughts, it adjusted the DNA of the structure in my brain and erased my memory. Though I still did not understand how, it managed to hide me in an unconscious state for weeks until the other Titans had arrived and had already passed through the desert surrounding the wreckage of my plane. When the Black Titan was closing in on us, the commander of the Pale Titan instantaneously sent me back to the barren desert, wearing nothing but the pair of khaki pants I was wearing during the flight. My wife was dead. I had an inoperable brain tumor and my memory was gone... it
all made sense, and made no sense at all, when everything went black.
The drowning pain had been going on for so long that I had almost become accustomed to it, almost numb and I had lost all sense of time. Perhaps this is what death felt like... a pain that lasted as long as the memory of life... life was pain, there was no arguing that point, but the pain was ending. Perhaps I was dying... perhaps I was already dead.
Chapter 4
The Long Walk
Elle tried to keep from looking over her shoulder, knowing that every glance backward slowed her forward movement and lessened her momentum. She kept to the road at first, but soon realized that cutting across the desert sands would cut distance and time from her journey to the city. As the sun rose higher in the pale blue sky, the day grew warmer and soon she was drenched in perspiration and began shedding her winter outerwear. Trudging forward like a soldier of fortune, Elle kept her eyes on the Phoenix suburbs ahead and tried to ignore the slow, rhythmic vibrations in the sand beneath her scuffed white sneakers. The large building that lay just outside the city limits was finally getting close enough for Elle to make out some of the details.
For the first time since she had walked away from her companions, Elle stopped. Her trembling hands raised to her mouth and unintelligible sounds escaped her as she began to panic. The large building that had been spotted from high on the hill was clearly no building. It was a resting Titan, with its appendages folded and its mass laying flat against the earth, just outside of the Phoenix suburbs. Elle turned slowly to look behind her, unsure of what direction would be the safest. “Son of a bitch!” She shouted to herself as she saw the two Titans passing over the hill and a third one extremely far off to the north... all heading to one meeting point. “Now what, now what, now what?” She repeated over and over, turning in circles and scanning the distance as if some magical answer would appear and show her the way.
